15th September, 2008. Today’s news – of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and of the difficulties of AIG – are momentous and of truly historic significance. While there is much more to be said about what is going on within the financial system, today I want to stand back and […]
Lehman Brothers and the US as ‘a sharecropper society’ Read More »
You have to admire the spin. The US Treasury Secretary, Comrade Hank Paulson, pictured here, announced today, Sunday 7th September, 2008 that the US government is natonalising two huge US banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Which means in effect that Comrade Paulson is socialising the losses of the shareholders and investors in these banks
Comrade Paulson, nationalised banks & socialism for the rich. Read More »
Had the privilege, together with other co-authors of the Green New Deal – Colin Hines, Jeremy Leggett and Tony Juniper – of addressing the annual conference of the Green Party yesterday. It was a moving and historic event. The Greens have finally come to their senses and elected a leader – and a brilliant one
The Greens elect a leader & adopt the Green New Deal Read More »
A Mr. David Smith in a letter to the Financial Times, (29 Aug 08) has suggested we brand this global recession ‘the bankers’ recession’. He has my support and enthusiastic commitment to raising awareness of the brand. Especially after today’s UK news.
The Bankers’ Recession and the £200 billion bail-out Read More »
Apologies in advance . This is a long post. I am getting feedback from those who have read the Green New Deal (GND) (which I co-authored) complaining that the Keynesian policies espoused therein will simply drive us back to the 1970s, to militant trades unionism and ‘stagflation’. Their concerns need a response.
In this big bad world of the Credit Crunch, powerful central bankers – civil servants all – have bent over backwards to help powerful and rich private bankers. On one day, ‘debtonation day’, central bankers in Europe and the US pumped an eye-watering $150 billion into the financial system, to keep big banks afloat. According
Ratcheting up the interest rate rack of torture. Read More »
US financial regulators are making the same mistakes as their Latin American equivalents in the debt crisis of the early 1980s, according to Andrés Velasco, Chile’s finance minister, in today’s Financial Times.
Open Democracy, 8th August, 2008 The balloon of irresponsible debt on which globalisation floated started to burst in August 2007. A year on from “debtonation day”, Ann Pettifor surveys the wreckage, pinpoints the culprits, and outlines the solutions. We now know that on 9 August 2007 – which I called “debtonation day“ – central bankers
…..see this story on Bloomberg…. Money Market `Plagued’ by Libor That Fed Can’t Reduce Gavin Finch, Bloomberg, 8th August 2008. — A year after central banks started to pump trillions of dollars into the financial system to end a seizure in credit markets caused by subprime mortgages, cash is about as tight as it’s ever
And on the subject of out-of-control interest……. Read More »
The world is now faced by a terrifying prospect: large scale and systemic economic failure of a globalised, highly integrated economy, caused by the collapse of massive credit and asset bubbles. This credit bubble, created by the private, de-regulated or ‘liberalised’ finance sector, inflated other bubbles, notably in property, but also in dot.coms, stocks and
